AI Made Me Look Foolish. Then I Learned

An astrophysicist describes presenting a major update to his void-finding algorithm VIDE, built with heavy AI assistance, only to have a collaborator expose a subtle but fundamental error in its edge handling that invalidated everything downstream. He argues that LLMs are fluent next-word predictors tuned to please users, and that their usefulness requires borrowing the alchemists' discipline: grounding outputs in verification, tracing provenance, and keeping human judgment as the final authority.